Transcript from video
Hello. It's Mike It from Better Happy,
And we're on the second video of the Happy Manager video series. So if you're a manager or people leader what I wanna share with you today is three questions that I want you to get used to asking yourself at least once a week, And again, if you're a manager or a people leader, I also want you to get used to asking this question of your people and seeking their feedback on these questions.
I'll talk about how you can do that a little bit toward the end of the video. So first of all, question one is health. Do I know how to improve or maintain my health? alongside my job. Do I know how to improve or maintain my health alongside my job? If the answer is yes, fantastic. If the answer is no, we need to dig into that and find out why because obviously, if you don't know how to, your house is gonna decline, and that's gonna affect your performance and your happiness.
Secondly, engagement or motivation. Do I enjoy and feel valued in my job? Do I enjoy and feel valued in my job? If the answer is yes, fantastic. We wanna keep doing what we're doing. If the answer is no, we need to dig into why because if we're not engaged in our work. We've not motivated the work that we spend on average at least fifty percent of our waking hours. That's going to affect our performance at work and our lives overall.
And then the third question is about performance and what we like to call a happy performance without sacrifice. So the question here is, am I able to perform to the high required of me at work without sacrificing my work-life balance? And that's really important. So am I able to perform to the high standards required of me at work without sacrificing my work-life balance?
This is especially important for managers and people leaders because you find that as you step up to those roles and you have all that extra responsibility, you're still able to work to that high standard, but you do that by sacrificing more life balance, which slowly leads to burnout, which is why a lot of managers tend to leave at the kind of between the two and five-year points because they're burning up. So those are the three questions. I want you to get used to asking yourself those questions at least once a week, and I want you to get very businessy with it and score and track where you're out with those questions because things will change over time.
The easiest thing to do here write those questions down. Once a week, score them, from one to ten. That starts to give you some data to track. You can find out your overall school by I had an over a school by had them together and provide them, but you don't need to do that. So how do we go about asking this with our people and what do we do if they do as I know? So there are a few different ways that you can ask your people these questions, and I highly, highly recommend doing this.
If you're trying to improve engagement in your workplace or with your team. Go and ask yourself, get set aside ninety minutes, write those three questions on the whiteboard, get your team over, put those three questions up, get everybody to score one to ten,
find your averages, put the averages up there, and then have a discussion about what we can do to improve it. That's gonna be way more impactful on the engagement and motivation and health levels in your business than any external consultant is gonna provide more than any piece of software or you're actually gonna provide.
Listening to your people and asking them is way more valuable. So there's one way of asking your people with a workshop. Okay? You might have to open yourself to a bit of screw today. At this moment you feel a bit uncomfortable, but that's the key to leading a healthy, happy, highly effective team, and to you feeling happy as well. Other ways you can do it, less direct if you're busy or virtual, you can email. Ask everybody to send you an email, or you can use a simple survey platform like type form to survey people and they can answer you anonymously then.
Of course, as well, you can use external do it? So what do we do when the answer is to know whether it's for us personally or for our teams? Well, we ask. Okay? Well, what do we need to know? Whereas our lack of knowledge, whereas what's going wrong in this area. Ask, keep asking why until we get to what we need to do to improve it. If we get to, what we need to improve and we don't know how to do that. That's when we start looking externally for help.
So for example, with health, for example, if I get to the point that it's because just gonna be,
I don't know what to do about it. That's then when we look for external help. But because it's targeted at our answers, that's gonna be highly effective to what we're trying to do.
As opposed to just going on the internet and finding something that tells you it's gonna improve health and get you to sit in meditation when really what you need to do is improve your back.
How often should we do this? As I said, as a manager for you as an individual, I think you need to get into a habit of doing it on a weekly basis. But with your teams highlight quarterly. I think you should get used to asking your teams these questions quarterly
because that gives you enough time to come up with suggestions and implement new ways of fixing them.
So that's my key teaching for today to be a happier manager to be a happy manager and develop happier teams. Ask yourself those three questions. Do I know how to improve or maintain my health alongside my job? Do I value do I enjoy and feel valued in my work,
am I able to work to high standards without sacrificing my work-life balance?
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Mike Jones Better Happy Founder
Mike founded Better Happy in 2018.
He now works with a variety of businesses ranging from small accountancies up to large organisations such as Travelodge on improving employee happiness. Mike's vision and the vision of Better Happy is 'Every employee happy, every business thriving'